Characters played by recognisable actors (the doctor played by Marimuthu, the cop played by Asokan Vincent) come and go. The biggest problem in Vada Chennai is that a much longer film (reportedly five-and-a-half hours where’s Netflix when you need them?) has been condensed to fit a running time of less than three hours. On reflection, they transform into poetic justice. When these events occur, they’re just… events. (A special mention for invoking the 1980s with T Rajendar’s ‘Sollama Thaane’, from Oru Thaayin Sabadham.) Note what Guna says at the beginning, in jail: “ Pannradhuleye periya paavam nanbanukku seyyara nambikkai dhrogam.” (The biggest sin is to betray a friend.”) Consider how another gangster, Senthil (Kishore), is stabbed in the back.
It’s one big tapestry, and if you don’t pay careful attention, you may miss the patterns formed by the plot points that skip back and forth in time. This is the chapter where we learn how even the things that happened to this place in North Madras - shades of Rajeev Ravi’s Kammatipaadam here, with development occurring over the displacement of the underprivileged - affect what happen to Anbu.
The film is divided into chapters that are named after these people: say, “Anbu Guna Chandra.” In one instance, along with the names of people, we get the word “Oor”: the place. And if Anbu hadn’t met Padma, they wouldn’t have fallen in love, they wouldn’t have been caught kissing, and the ensuing shame wouldn’t have driven Anbu to murder, and he wouldn’t have sought refuge with the gangster named Guna (Samuthirakani)… This is the structure of an epic: the macro casts a shadow over the micro. If he hadn’t been assassinated, anarchy wouldn’t have erupted on the streets, and Anbu’s mother wouldn’t have thought of using the chaos to rob things from a store, and Padma wouldn’t have had the same idea, and Anbu may never have collided with her. In the past, dressed up in ballooning pants like the ones Prabhu Deva wore in Kadhalan, Anbu meets Padma (Aishwarya Rajesh) - but the meeting is “caused” by Rajiv Gandhi. The dense texture of Vetrimaaran’s screenplay imagines existence as a carrom board, with every move causing collisions and ricochets. (There are shades of Chandan Arora’s Siddharth-starrer, Striker, which was also about a carrom champion in an urban ghetto who’s caught in gangland crossfire.) But life intervenes. (It means “affection”.) All he wants is to become a carrom champion. The character Dhanush plays in Vada Chennai is epic - though he’s a more reluctant hero. Arjuna may have been the most heroic - or the most “mass” - character, but the story is shaped equally by Karna’s loyalty, or Draupadi’s thirst for revenge. The narrative is epic, like, say, the Mahabharata. It has a big-screen quality, like the Cinemascope logo (narrow in the centre and broadening towards the edges). Cast: Dhanush, Aishwarya Rajesh, Andrea Jeremiahįor a while now, Vetrimaaran has been calling Vada Chennai (North Chennai) an epic, and it turns out he was right.
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